The US has a patchwork of systems for checking outstanding warrants — it's worst in the south, where paper records and a system that is "labyrinthine and informal" exacerbates the problem — which means that cops often mistakenly arrest people for having outstanding warrants that were canceled long before.
Poor and racialized people are the most frequent subject of these "ghost warrant" arrests and thanks to underfunded public defenders, some people have repeatedly spent months in jail over years-canceled warrants for petty offenses like failure to appear or unpaid fines.
Ghost warrants happen when clerks make mistakes or omissions, or when correctly updated records are not entered into databases.
Victims of these errors are rarely entitled to compensation, thanks to Supreme Court rulings that held that "as long as there's no evidence police acted in bad faith, honest mix-ups are an expected and acceptable side effect of finding and jailing criminals."
Ironically, computerization of record-keeping means that sometimes a warrant is live and visible from any police terminal in the country, while the judge's order canceling the warrant is mouldering on a sheet of paper in a filing cabinet in some small town courthouse.
One of her clients, Alvon Jones, was injured in a car accident in December. But when police arrived, he said, their first move was to ask for his ID and run it for warrants.The officers told him he was under arrest. An active warrant from 2011 had appeared on their squad-car computer, showing that he was still wanted for armed robbery, according to court records.
They didn't know that Jones, who was accused of committing that crime—stealing another kid's backpack—when he was 16, had already served more than two years in the notorious Orleans Parish Prison for it.
He'd endured being a kid in New Orleans' adult jail. "It messed me up," Jones said. "It was war in there, every day and night."
Jones had already entered a plea agreement with a judge and served his sentence, records show. But here he was, years later, now a father of three, facing the possibility of going back to jail.
Orians scrambled to find his court docket to show that it was all a mistake. She said the jail's deputies told her that this happens all the time, and they'd have him released within hours.
They're Haunted by
'Ghost Warrants'
Years After
Their Arrests [Eli Hager/The Marshall Project]
